Opportunity to re-think food production in Canada amid COVID-19: report

Food policy experts say COVID-19 has provided a window to transform Canada’s food production system into a more sustainable model.

A report from Food Secure Canada, an alliance of organizations working to advance food security, said Canada shouldn’t return to the industrial food production model that’s been slowed by the novel coronavirus. Instead, Food Secure Canada executive director Gisèle Yasmeen said that governments should invest in existing local infrastructures, which she said can help Canada meet environmental and social goals — while boosting the economy, post-coronavirus.

“This is the time, now, to look at the food system,” she said in an interview with iPolitics on Friday. “The writing is on the wall in food production.”

Yasmeen said local food systems built over the last few decades are already using the opening caused by COVID-19 to develop further. The government should be investing in these types of food hubs, she urged — noting that a focus on local production could get people back to work, while stimulating the economy “in the right way.”

She pointed to the program lunchLAB in B.C., where non-profit groups Fresh Roots and Growing Chefs are providing more than 5,000 meals to 260 families each week, in the wake of COVID-19 school closures. Yasmeen said the federal government should build on this existing program by following its commitment in Budget 2019 to create a national healthy school food program in collaboration with the province and stakeholders.

“That can, and should, be made a permanent thing,” she said. “There’s a lot of potential to build up what’s already happening on the ground.”

The report found that, if Ontario replaced 10 per cent of the top 10 fruit and vegetable imports with locally grown products, there would be a $250 million increase in provincial GDP and the creation of 3,400 jobs. The impact on job creation would be the same for a 10 per cent shift to local food production in New Brunswick.

Yasmeen used Canada’s production of lentils as an example, noting that Canada exports them in bulk, then the lentils are packaged abroad and brought back into the country.

“Instead of this huge, international export-oriented system controlled by a handful of corporations … there are things happening on the ground that are putting more control into the hands of people, small producers, processors,” she said. “That’s what we need to build on for the kind of resilience that we need.”

The report also said challenges of the industrial food system have been front page news in recent months, with COVID-19 exposing the “fragility and concentration of power” in Canada’s dominant long-distance food supply chain.

For example, poultry, cattle, hog and dairy producers across North America have been financially devastated by restaurant closures due to emergency orders, and meat processing operations have slowed after COVID-19 outbreaks occurred at plants. Yasmeen said close to 95 per cent of meat processing is done in a handful of facilities, which she said has resulted in significant bottlenecks with livestock.

René Roy, first vice-chair of the Canadian Pork Council’s board of directors and a producer in Quebec, told the House agriculture committee earlier this week that there’s a backlog of over 100,000 pigs in Ontario and Quebec alone due to be processed. He said farmers are being forced to euthanize pigs, resulting in food being removed from the supply chain. As a result, he said that Canada could be forced to rely on imports, while a continued reduction in processing could contribute to a food shortage.

Meanwhile, Bob Lowe, a rancher, feedlot owner and president of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association told the committee last week that his industry has an estimated backlog of 100,000 cattle that are ready for market with nowhere to be processed. He told members on the committee that the cattle have dropped in value from to $166 million from $250 million, while costing about $4,000 per day to care for.

While farmers are forced euthanize livestock they can no longer afford to feed, Food Secure Canada estimates that food insecurity in Canada will double from the most recent statistics of 4.4 million people by the end of 2020.

In a letter, The National Farmers’ Union — an organization made up of Canadian farm families — called for the building of smaller slaughter plants in each province to disperse the threats to food security. They argued that such a system would ensure that if one plant was closed, the food chain across the entire country would not be disrupted. The letter also stated the impact of large processing facilities on workers, saying their labour is “stressful at the best of times and downright dangerous now.”

“We could assure meat supply from local farms to meet local demands,” NFU members Vicki Burns and Fred Tait wrote. “Providing safe secure food from local farms to local consumers is entirely possible without putting meat packing workers at risk.”

Similar calls have been made in the U.S., where a lobby that represents cattle farmers and ranchers, R-Calf USA, asked the White House to consider restructuring the beef industry so there are more plants owned by more people. “This high level of physical and geographical concentration of America’s vital beef supply chain is intuitively and inherently contrary to America’s food security interests, as now unequivocally demonstrated by Covid-19,” their letter argued.

Will Harris, a cattleman at White Oak Pastures in southern Georgia who spoke to The Guardian early this week, said his resistance to relying on corporate processing plants has allowed him to continue working and hire more staff, while COVID-19 continues to decimate operations at mass production facilities.

Yasmeen said the federal government must act on Food Policy For Canada, a policy program that seeks to “help Canada build a healthier and more sustainable food system” that was announced by Agriculture and Agri-Food Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau last summer. She said they are waiting for the government to officially name members of the Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council, and added that having a multi-stakeholder forum in place would help respond to food challenges created by COVID-19.